Title

Author

Date of Award

12-12-2018

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.Sc.

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Jessica Chen

Rights

CC-BY-NC-ND

Abstract

Cross-Border shipping of goods among different distributors is an essential part of transportation across Canada and U.S. These two countries are heavily dependent on border crossing locations to facilitate international trade between each other. This research considers the identification of the international tours accomplishing the shipping of goods. A truck tour is a round trip where a truck starts its journey from its firm or an industry, performing stops for different purposes that include taking a rest, fuel refilling, and transferring goods to multiple locations, and returns back to its initial firm location. In this thesis, we present a three step method on mining GPS truck data to identify all possible truck tours belonging to different carriers. In the first step, a clustering technique is applied on the stop locations to discover the firm for each carrier. A modified DBSCAN algorithm is proposed to achieve this task by automatically determining the two input parameters based on the data points provided. Various statistical measures like count of unique trucks and count of truck visits are applied on the resulting clusters to identify the firms of the respective carriers. In the second step, we tackle the problem of classifying the stop locations into two types: primary stops, where goods are transferred, and secondary stops like rest stations, where vehicle and driver needs are met. This problem is solved using one of the trade indicator called Specialization Index. Moreover, several set of features are explored to build the classification model to classify the type of stop locations. In the third step, having identified the firm, primary and secondary locations, an automated path finder is developed to identify the truck tours starting from each firm. The results of the specialization index and the feature-based classification in identifying stop events are compared with the entropy index from previous work. Experimental results show that the proposed set of cluster features significantly add classification power to our model giving 98.79% accuracy which in turn helps in discovering accurate tours.